“Grace, dear, I didn’t mean——”
“All right, mother. But I have my feelings, you know.”
“The old Reynolds house on Meridian Street has been turned into a garage,” said Ethel; “it’s too bad those old homes had to go. Miss Reynolds has bought a house not far from where Bob Cummings built.”
Any mention of the Cummingses, no matter how inadvertent, inevitably precipitated a discussion of that family from some angle. Mrs. Durland said for the hundredth time that they didn’t deserve their prosperity; she doubted very much whether they were happy.
“Bob’s the best one of the family,” she continued. “Tom and Merwin haven’t amounted to anything and they never will. It must have been a blow to the family when Merwin married a girl who was nobody, or worse. She worked in some automobile office.”
Ethel challenged the statement that the girl Merwin Cummings married worked in an automobile office. It was a railroad office, and though it didn’t matter particularly with which method of transportation the young woman was identified before her marriage, Mrs. Durland and Ethel debated the question for several minutes. Mrs. Durland had only heard somewhere that Mrs. Merwin Cummings had been a stenographer for an automobile agent while Ethel was positive that a railroad office had been the scene of the girl’s labors, her authority being another girl who worked in the same place.
“Jessie didn’t speak any too highly of her,” Ethel added; “not that there was anything really wrong with the girl. She ran around a good deal, and usually had two or three men on the string.”
“A good many very nice girls keep two or three men on the string,” said Grace. “I don’t see that there’s anything so terrible in that.”
III
The next day at noon Grace went to a trust company where she kept an account that represented the aggregate of small gifts of cash she had received through a number of years at Christmas and on her birthdays. As she waited at the window for her passbook, Bob Cummings crossed the lobby on his way to the desk of one of the officers. She wondered how he would greet her if they met, and what her attitude toward him ought to be in view of the break between her father and Isaac Cummings. She found a certain mild excitement as she pondered this, her eyes occasionally turning toward Cummings as he leaned against the railing that enclosed the administrative offices of the company. Grace had always liked and admired him; and it had hurt her more than she ever confessed that after the removal of the Cummingses from the old neighborhood Bob had gradually ceased his attentions. Perhaps his family had interfered as her mother had hinted; but it made no difference now that he had married and passed completely out of her ken.